How many childhood hurts do you remember, wherein response wasn't love?

This hurts me more than it does you.

Yea, right!

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Punishing or accusing a child, in advance of being tempted, eliminates motive for doing right.

Ministering to adults is more important than to children.

Train up a child to love God and church and, when he is old, he will love church.

Children are future leaders of tomorrow.

If children aren't aloud to serve today, they won't be leading tomorrow.

Don't cause children to suffer by telling them they can't serve Jesus.

Cannabis, misunderstandings and possibilities.

Written by Malcolm James Pugh

I think a lot of things being said now stem from plain fact that Government at present have abjectly given in to something endemic they feel they can not fight. So they seek to liberalize and soften impact, to talk down effects, and to move goalposts as they do with anything that is a little too difficult to deal with in a proper manner. Sweep it under carpet and relabel it as something else.

I speak from having taken cannabis in seventies, hippy era of peace not war, love to all men, much of whose language and terms are now coming back into trendy and cool use. But there are fundamental differences between then and now, which young people should be made aware of.

Then cannabis was in form of a leaf, a naturally occurring plant. Now it is synthetic, as in most of other areas of life where natural has given way to unnatural, to our eternal detriment. Coincidentally enough, it is now around forty times stronger, as well as being chemical based.

The Governing people who seek to legalise and feel danger is slight, are by and large ex users of a much lesser potency of a naturally occurring plant. They feel little danger in occasional recreational use of a drug they feel did little to harm their long term prospects.

This is based on false assumption that people tend to start smoking it around university stage and peter out of its use in a few years, with no addictive element. Also that they tend, like we did, to only use it occasionally at times when we needed to calm down after a tough project, or relax at a concert, again remembering product then was one fortieth as potent and much more mellow than it is today.

That is being charitable and assuming they are not in full informed of dangers. This also begs question, if not why not, and if so why run and hide.

This creates at least two anomalies. One is that our young people can point finger at our generation and say, you are being hypocritical, when you took it yourselves. Secondly, we did not start at twelve to thirteen, and use it every day at forty times strength. The weight of evidence of severe psychiatric damage is I feel too heavy to discount any more, plus although in itself said to be non addictive, culture that has sprung up around it tends to keep people in a circle of self same users, and a massively significant portion of our youth are taking it. So there is a great peer pressure to take something which Government at present sends out signals saying, that it is not too bad to use it, just keep it relatively discreet and we will leave you alone.

I fear this is storing up a time bomb of serious psychological problems, and perhaps strengths and constitution of substance should be taken into account more. Politicians surely hear word cannabis and relate to their own youth, where if they did not take it they knew people who did who by and large are still sane. This is not consistent with what is in circulation today, nor indicative of higher daily use of a drug that formerly was taken recreationally every week or month or concert or so.

It also gives police an almost impossible job, as there are no guidelines to follow, and also drug pushers can admit to cannabis but be carrying other more harmful drugs as well, with impunity. Surely if you are carrying more on you than enough for your personal use for at most a weekend say, then you are a dealer. Just set a level that is a definite level and above it is illegal. The experiment in London boroughs has been truly and demonstrably disastrous, yet it is being cloned to rest of Britain as if as harmless as sweets.

Perhaps if we actually addressed our inner cities and used money earmarked for them, yet held back, some of our most deprived kids could go to places where they could enjoy themselves, perhaps with an emphasis on sport and exercise to help combat obeisity, where it is easy to blame junk food and convenient to forget lack of basic exercise and plain lazy and slothful habits. But where in all conscience have kids got to go to, when even relatively well off kids to what we were are reduced to straggling on street corners like beggars or tramps and invariably annoying and alienating passers by, creating a division and schism in society between young and old much more substansive and divisive than natural contempt of vigour of youth for oldies like us. It is easy to criticise this behavior, and easy to sympathise with victims of it, but what are we doing to provide an alternative to this kind of behavior, a place to meet, to go to and learn, have fun, and compete against each other at a sporting not warring level. I had little to my name as a kid, I worked markets and two paper rounds and anything I could think up to make a few bob, and we all played cricket or football till dark in street, everybody, loads of us. We were not fat or a real nuisance, but we did not have pernicious power of television advertising and brainwashing telling us what to do, or parents determined not to be as strict as ours were and creating a soft youth who are spoilt rotten where we had nowt. Somewhere in middle is right, but it does not help kids now cope with an ever more sophisticated world wide machinery of selling and media manipulation around them.

Money should be released to inner cities to build centres for youth to go to, and proper well equipped centres run by local hard men, or respected local figures, evn criminals who at least see their future is in their kids getting out of gutter and into a real world on their own two feet, who will ensure zero destruction levels of what is provided. This should be expanded to rural areas and a gradual education in exercise and diet should be introduced.

At present anything that is too difficult for this government is relabeled and ignored, and what this is doing long term to our youth god alone knows.

To reiterate, cannabis is forty times stronger than it was and synthetic. It is abused from age twelve daily through to way past twenty. I would not take this if I were given it free, nor would any of my old friends and associates I canvassed on this subject. Also I might add, I ended up with a smoking addiction it took twenty four years to quit, and most kids smoke it here, so there again we have a vicious circle of addiction which surely does kill you, even if current cannabis does not send you mad, or kill your will to work completely. It is an exponentially growing apathy drug in high strength with, for very many, serious psychological side effects, and for government to pretty well give up on it is yet another abject failure in their long litany of failing British public at large. One could understand this if their minds had been destroyed by this drug in its present form, but what they used, if they did, was a pale imitation of todays fare. Each to their own, but I would not take present stuff, and we are forcing more and more to go through what passes for Universities, at end of which not only do they have huge debts but a smoking drinking and cannabis habit which needs money to feed it just when a lot of them are unable to find work. Is it any wonder there is so much theft. If we channelled money we have to spend on clearing up mess which is our society at present into free University education, which surely is right of anyone, and an educational programme backed up by free coach travel to all schools, ensuring safety and massively cutting congestion at same time, then maybe then we would not have these problems to deal with in foirst place.